


Dualities

by executrix



Category: Blakes7, Firefly
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-07
Updated: 2011-05-07
Packaged: 2017-10-19 02:10:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/195706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's practically a statutory requirement that every sci-fi show have an "Arena" episode. The Blakes7 version is called "Duel," and involves many Important Lessons About Life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dualities

DUALITIES  
A Wacky Story With Ribcages  
\--Executrix

Mal hadn’t concerned himself over-much about why anybody wanted a bunch of flat rocks moved from No to Where, but when he saw the barren, stony landscape he knew. They had a powerful lot of tombstones already, but just like the coal merchants in Newcastle, they wanted some more. “You head on back,” he told Wash, who’d made planetfall to help them get the rocks offloaded.

The clients were two gals--an old ‘un and a young’un. The young’un wasn’t as young as Kaylee. She was more Inara’s age, and sort of favored Inara too, a pretty brunette with no excessive amount of underwear under that shiny dress of hers. The old one, though, had a look of devilment in her eye that made Mal wonder what she’d been like a half-century or so younger. There was also something about her that made her look like Patience’s sister. Mal could just picture them at the festive board for the Winter Solstice. Probably with all her good jewelry pinned over her bullet-proof vest.

Wash hummed a semi-tune as he drove the mule into the open hatch. It closed behind him, groaning a little as usual, and then locked down tight. He glanced behind him to see if Zoe and Mal were OK, which they might have been but he couldn’t tell because they definitely weren’t there. He hammered at the button for opening the hatch, but nothing happened. He started yelling, not into the comm. but just yelling, and a moment later Kaylee leaned down from the catwalk.

“Zup, Wash?”

“I drove in, ready to load out these empty pallets, then the door shut behind me. Can’t get it open noway. Zoe and Mal were right behind me, but they couldn’t have got in first, and how’m I going to go get them if the hatch won’t open?”

“Well, look through the ‘scope,” Kaylee said. “They ain’t right out front, that’s for sure.”

They dialed up Mal’s and Zoe’s pasukoms, but there was only a dead-air buzz. They even tried calling Wash’s from Kaylee’s, in case Zoe had somehow picked up the wrong one, but there was no answer. So they got on the ship comm.

The bridge got pretty crowded with Wash, Book, Jayne, Kaylee, Simon, and Inara all crammed in there, but the negative spaces of absence also yawned. They all squinted to see the hazy display, pulling toward green (“Damn, I kept meaning to calibrate that monitor,” Wash said) and listen to the crackle that occasionally yielded an intelligible word. “I never really thought ‘bout what a weak-tea LD Comm these Fireflys have,” Kaylee said sadly.

That was Mal and Zoe all right--talking to somebody, and then stalking through a broad-leafed jungle landscape whose natural beauty they were the two least likely to appreciate.

“You know the drill,” Jayne said. “Whenever we get in a big fuckadoodle like this, we just cut and run and leave ‘em to it. No use all of us going down with the ship.”

“Yeah, well, if any fucking thing on this ship except the minimal life support was working, then the fucking door would work and I could go get my wife and we wouldn’t be having this problem. So the only going down that’s gonna happen around here is you sucking my dick and shutting your mouth.”

Book stepped in to defuse the situation, gently patting Wash’s shoulder. “Wash, it’s only natural that you’re angry. But perhaps the more constructive reaction would be for you and Kaylee to go to the engine room and see what’s wrong there and what can be salvaged.”

“That gonna work, Preacher?” Jayne asked after the door to the bridge clanged shut.

Book shrugged. “I don’t think so. But it’ll distract them for a while.”

Simon returned from checking on River, who luckily was still engaged in painting the grout on the vapor-shower floor with Inara’s blue nail polish. The tiles were half an inch on a side, so this could be expected to take some time.

“No, I think there’s a more…numinous…aspect to the situation,” Book said.

“That means ‘Eerie-ass shit,’” Simon said to Jayne’s raised eyebrow. “I’m sure there’s a rational explanation, Shepherd,” Simon said.

“There are more things in heavens and in earths than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” Book said.

“What, you mean they’re some kind of evil spirits?” Jayne asked.

“It’s got to be more complicated than that,” Simon said.

Sinofar gave Mal and Zoe a machete apiece, a handful of water purification tablets, and a small sealed container of matches. Zoe had her own matches, but wasn’t too proud to take some more. “Got an entrenching tool?” she asked.

“A pleasure dealing with a professional,” Sinofar said, snapping her fingers and handing the result to Zoe. Zoe, who always calmed down when there was something concrete to do, picked out a big tree with a good canopy and broad boughs in easy climbing distance, dug a latrine, and started braiding chopped-off lengths of vine into rope. When she had a decent few yards wound around her waist, she hacked down some boughs and sharpened the ends.

“Soon, it will be the Time of Testing,” Sinofar crooned, “And you may taste the death of a friend.”

“Call that a novelty?” Mal said, from where he was sitting on the ground. He knew why Zoe was hopping around like a flea on a hot griddle, but he didn’t feel any need to join her. “I’m a soldier. Uh, what’re we waiting for, anyway?”

“Sundown,” Giroc said crisply.

“Why’s that?” Mal asked. “Once it gets dark, what’re we gonna do, sit up in a tree and throw nuts at each other like a bunch of space monkeys?”

“We have some very special guests for you,” Giroc said. “Oh, here they come now.”

“My assistant, him you know already,” Adelai Niska said. Dobson stepped out from behind him, plenty mad, alive not so much, his shirt still stiff with the blood that streamed from the shot through the eye that killed him.

Zoe gave a grunt of disgust--where she came from, what’s dead should stay dead. Mal had a moment of nostalgia for the cross he once would have had on him. But then he’d seen plenty of chapter-plays where the cross didn’t do nothin’ without the belief to back it up.

Mal and Zoe exchanged a look in the dying light, and scooted for their tree. “Not bad terrain, Sarge,” Zoe said, settling herself back against a tree branch. She had made crosses out of ramps--wild garlic--lashed together with vines and hung them on the lower branches. Maybe one thing would work, maybe the other.

“Awww, Zoe,” he said. “This ain’t lookin’ good, I know, and if it turns out that this time I got your ticket punched, I am truly sorry. And I just want to say, nobody could ever have had a better friend or a better 2IC. Not nobody nowhere. Never.”

Zoe shrugged. “We’ve seen a lot worse. Got through that, get through this.” She yearned for Wash to be OK, and was glad he wasn’t there--one less thing to worry about. Too bad she hadn’t whittled more stakes, though. Never knew when you’d need a stake for something.

Back on Serenity, Book steadily read the Ritual of Deliverance out of his breviary, which was entirely too scary for Jayne’s superstitions and entirely too primitive for Simon’s scientific atheism, but Inara was the first to feel able to walk away from the comfort of company. “I’m going to go get some sleep,” Inara said. “Of course, you can reach me if anything happens.”

“Sleep!” Jayne said. “I ain’t sleepin’, and I ain’t the one sweet on Mal.”

Biting back the temptation to say, “That’s not what Wash says,” Inara said, “I don’t see why it requires a lot of hand-wringing to prove that you care. Or why I have to prove anything to you at all.” She left the bridge, walking steadily toward her shuttle.

“Come in,” Inara said, later, and Simon walked through the shuttle door, his hand curled around something. “Did you ever use that sedative I gave you?” he asked. (“Here,” he had said, handing her a case with an old-fashioned hypodermic in it. He liked her immediately, as a hothouse orchid among the field of--daisies to be polite, dandelions, more likely--that was engulfing him and River. “It won’t kill you, or anyone else, but if you ever need to take a little vacation for twelve hours or so, this should do it. Not in a vein, just anywhere under the skin.”) “You can have some more, if you like.” She shook her head.

They worked it out that Mal was supposed to go to sleep while Zoe was on sentry go, but Mal couldn’t sleep anyway so they talked.

“How come you’n’me, we never?” Mal asked.

Zoe, who had her own theories, some of them involving the multiple free passes that Tracey’s pretty face earned him, didn’t reply.

“Oh, OK, first I was a Sergeant and you weren’t but a Spec4, there’s rules about that stuff and that’s just common-sense too. And a lot later, there was Wash. But in between, when the three of us was goin’ around lookin’ for our own place to be, and then when the two of us got Serenity…”

Zoe, sorting through memories of Wash to pick the best one for last, continued to not reply.

“I dunno, maybe we been through so much together, it made us more like brother and sister. Though if it was the Doc and River up here, I bet they’d be havin’ one for the road. Hell, maybe that’s what made her crazy, knowin’ she’s not supposed to want to jump his bones. And I bet he near halfway feels the same way about her, that’s what makes him so squirrelly all the time.”

“I think that’s got a lot more to do with ending up on a raggedy-ass spaceship getting shot at than anything more Freudian, sir.”

“C’mon, Zoe,” Mal said. “Time to go demonstrate the death of a fiend to the fella who’s got his own.”

They headed off, quartering the terrain, each holding a stake and with two extras in readiness.

Zoe cursed herself when she fell into the pit, although luckily she was only tangled up in the net, not speared on a punji stick. She fought hard, but ended up bound in vine ropes, at the bottom of the pit, with Dobson’s fangs at her throat.

“Stop that!” Niska said.

“I require serum, or my efficiency will be compromised,” Dobson said.

“So, go eat a bat. Here, is plenty bats.”

A lifetime of obeying orders died hard, and Dobson backed away, scrambled out of the pit, and went to hunt. Niska realized that he should have told Dobson to track down Mal while he was at it. Such bad help, always I get, he thought, and braided himself a vine garrotte and went to look for Mal.

He lit a match and held it up before him. He was not a connoisseur of physical darkness, so he didn’t know how long he had before there would be enough dawn to take Dobson out of the picture, leaving him at the mercy of his two younger, stronger opponents.

Before he encountered Mal or Zoe he found Dobson, puking dramatically on a tree root.

“The creature’s blood was not…suitable,” Dobson said.

“Too bad,” Niska said. “I look down at pretty black girl all tied up, I get big hard-on. When you get to be my age--well, if you ever did got to be my age--you think, big hard-on is nothing to sneeze at.” Dobson’s one eye, and the white parts of his shirt, gleamed in the light of the match.

“So, Dead Man, you can see in dark?” Niska asked. “Yes,” Dobson said. “Stay with me, then. Lead me to them. Oh, and tell me where pit is, before ironically I fall into it myself.”

They wandered for hours, until Niska was close to exhaustion. “I can smell them,” Dobson whispered to Niska, a minute or so before Zoe whispered “I can hear Niska,” to Mal, and they closed in battle.

“What are you going to do?” Sinofar asked, appearing from somewhere. “Kill him?”

“Well, yeah,” Mal said. “It was that or try to sell him a half-share in a gold mine on Phobos, and you got me here clean without any legal papers. Anyway, ’Nara’s people say, you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him! Politely, of course.”

“You might enjoy it,” Giroc whispered in his ear.

“That’s good,” Mal said. “Too damn little wacky fun in the ‘Verse anyway.” He pulled the machete out of his belt and cut off Niska’s head. He paused for a moment to see if it was going to grow back, and was damn glad to see it didn’t. Then he paused for another moment and scraped the machete against the coarse grass, using the sole of his boot to wipe off as much of the blood as he could, and stuck the machete back in his belt. Only a fool’d throw away a good blade.

Giroc clapped her hands and laughed. “*Damn,* Mal, if that don’t beat all! You ain’t the candy-ass you look!”

“Cap’n?” Zoe asked, one of the stakes from the pit poised over Dobson’s ribcage.

Dobson’s one eye stared balefully at Mal, who was inclined to let him skate. Back in the day, he was just the hired help, he wasn’t really bad. Hell, he was even on the right side of the law.

Mal mildly wondered about what Book would say the Bible had to say about killing already dead folks. Didn’t matter what he did, Inara would say he was wrong anyway, so he didn’t try to take her vote. Doc (who was a smart boy, even if his predilections were a little on the Egyptian side) would probably say that killing people was like those ten-ren painkillers in his medkit. He’d dole ‘em out if your leg was all shot off or something, but not just because the party was winding down and Kaylee hadn’t thought to make enough hooch.

Maybe the merciful thing to do would be to put him at rest. A second glance at Dobson showed that after his abrupt departure from life, he wasn’t ready to go into the Wherever.

“I killed him enough already,” Mal said. “If I did it again, all I’d get would be bragging rights.” He conferred with Giroc for a moment. She cackled. “Your own risk, Sonny.”

“Here,” Mal said, rolling up his sleeve. “No hard feelings. Have one on me. But just a short one.”

“Fuck you,” Dobson said, but only through red-smeared lips.

By the time Mal and Zoe walked out of the clearing, Serenity was there, and whether it was the Learning of Lessons or Book’s prayers or marital love or skillful intuitive electronics repair or that Inara knew a client or a Bodhisatva who could take off landlocks, anyway the hatch opened, and this time when Wash flipped the switches they went out of atmo and into the black.

“What was all that about?” Jayne asked, pouring half of the last of the tequila into one mug each for Mal and Zoe.

“Damned if I know,” Mal said.


End file.
